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Can U.S. Troops Run McChrystal’s ‘Soft Power’ Playbook?

America has fought in its fair share of insurgencies and counterinsurgencies — from our own revolution to Iraq. But in Afghanistan, the U.S. military is trying something different. In a rather unorthodox approach, commanders there are radically de-emphasizing the “kinetic,” bombs and bullets fight, and instead putting a premium on persuading the people to side against the Taliban. That may sound similar to the strategy General David Petraeus executed in Iraq, and helped postulate in the military’s counterinsurgency field manual. But General Stanley McChrystal has taken the approach several steps further in Afghanistan — discouraging cordon-and-search raids, all-but-banning air strikes, directing troops to consider retreat rather than attacking a town. “It’s not the number of people you kill, it’s the number of people you convince. It’s the number of people that don’t get killed. It’s the number of houses are not destroyed,” McChrystal told his troops recently.

It’s an attractive goal, and most soldiers and marines say they’re on board. But the idea runs completely counter to how those forces have been trained. So it’s been tough to break the old habits. Just look at the “operational updates” that McChrystal’s public affairs shop has issued in the last three days…

Even General McChrystal’s publicists are having a hard time sticking to the script.

For commanders fighting in some of Afghanistan’s most hotly-contested areas, the struggle has been even more intense. How much restraint do you show, before you jeopardize your troops? How do you protect the population, if the Taliban have the freedom to roam and attack at will? When is it time to go “kinetic,” and drop the softer approach? There are no easy answers, as I saw this summer with Echo company of the 2/8 Marines. Captain Eric Meador, the company’s commander, wanted to spend more time holding shuras and swaying village elders to his cause. But there were too many Taliban in the vicinity, he felt, to allow those peaceful talks to take place. So instead, he sent the majority of his marines out on patrols that were almost certain to turn into firefights. “I call it the eye gouge,” Meador told me. “To keep the good areas here relatively calm, you have to go to the enemy and punch him in the chest, punch him in the face.”

The conundrum has become even more perplexing in Afghanistan’s Arghandab river valley. One battalion of the 5th Stryker Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division has been locked in a vicious struggle there that’s not only killed 21 U.S. soldiers and more than 50 insurgents in just a few months, Army Times’ Sean Naylor reports. “It’s led to a popular company commander’s controversial replacement and… caused the soldiers at the tip of the spear… to accuse their battalion and brigade commanders of not following the guidance of senior coalition commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal to adopt a ‘population-centric’ counterinsurgency approach.”

When the 5/2 deployed to Afghanistan, brigade commander Col. Harry Tunnell “announced his intention to pursue a ‘counter-guerrilla’ campaign,” Naylor continues. That focus on the enemy seemed to be at odds with McChrystal’s emphasis on the people. But Tunnell said the militants were too tough to consider anything but kinetics.

He outlined how he intended his approach to work. “[W]hen it comes to the enemy, you have leadership, supply chains and formations. And you’ve really got to tackle all three of those,” Tunnell said… “[W]hen you degrade a formation substantially, that will stop operations. And then if you degrade formations, supply chains and leadership near simultaneously, you’ll cause the enemy in the area to collapse, and that is what we’re trying to do here.”

Asked if this was an enemy-centric approach, Tunnell replied: “The enemy informs how you gain access to the population. You cannot ignore it. We were taking horrible casualties trying to gain access to the population, and we knew that we needed to get to the population, and so if we didn’t conduct the types of operations that we’re conducting throughout the brigade’s area … we wouldn’t be able to get to the population. So you can’t separate the two.”

“If there is one constant in population-centric COIN it is the element of violence and coercion against a civilian population,” e-mails the New America Foundation’s Michael Cohen, using the military acronym for counterinsurgency. “Certainly, that was the case in Malaya, Algeria, Kenya and Vietnam — to name a few places often cited as COIN successes. Now granted, the level of coercion varied significantly. But whether it was the Briggs plan, the Battle of Algiers or the Phoenix program (and its precursor with the Strategic Hamlet program) coercion was endemic. This was even the case in Iraq, although the majority of violence there was perpetrated by a third party.”

He adds, “Has a population-centric COIN operation ever succeeded that didn’t rely on coercion and violence against the civilian population, which is near I understand it, is what we are trying to do in Afghanistan?”

I’m not one for predictions. But I’ll bet this issue — of whether or not to stick strictly to a counterinsurgency focused solely on the locals — continues to be the central debate of the Afghanistan war in 2010. The key struggle with be with the Taliban, of course. But to win that fight, the U.S. military will have to keep from fighting itself.